181–190 of 255 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was the thought that went through my mind when I first watched that piece. I think I'm unusually excited by incremental improvement and routine maintenance though.
Me too. There is something wrong with us. :)
This picture on wikipedia of the dam has a really beautiful contrast between the water and the land around it ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ea/Mo... ) Also draws attention to the fact that there's a massive amount of water behind the dam. edit: wiki link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosul_Dam , to save you the effort of googling :)
Any satellite view gives you even better idea about the amount of the water and the danger for Mosul: http://i.imgur.com/Fg847Xe.jpg And for the size, even when you see the whole Mediterranean, the lake is still visible (on the right)! http://i.imgur.com/5ktcQEr.jpg The areas affected in Mosul, the location of other cities that are affected and the structure of the dam are successfully presented in the Guardian's art…
for example, clinton's iraq sanctions were one of osama bin ladens stated justifications:
UNICEF: 500,000 children (including sanctions, collateral effects of war). "[As of 1999] [c]hildren under 5 years of age are dying at more than twice the rate they were ten years ago." (As is customary, this report was based on a survey conducted in cooperation with the Iraqi government and by local authorities in the provinces not controlled by the Iraqi government)[35]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iraq#Effects...
It seems pointless to continually fix a dam with such design flaws and needing constant repair.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"To understand his tantrum one must understand the kinship he feels with the great men of history, with history itself. Lack of reverence for an image of Copernicus might suggest a lack of reverence for Saddam." From : http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/05/tales-of... Dictators are violent, not stupid. They understand risks, and make decisions like any other leader.
Most dictators tend to behave in ways that doesn't exactly encourage their minions to be open and honest with them - the unhappy outcome of the 1937 Census in the Soviet Union being a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Census_%281937%29 I think it would have been a foolishly courageous engineer who told Saddam that his dam project wasn't going to work...
> Samarai had detailed evidence to back up his views—photographs, news reports, numbers. The Iraqis could expect nothing more than swift defeat, and the threat that Iran would take advantage of their weakness by invading from the north.
And Saddam's response?
>To Samarai's surprise, Saddam did not seem angry with him for delivering this bad news. In fact, he acted appreciative that Samarai had given it to him straight. "I trust you, and that's your opinion," he said. "You are a trustworthy person, an honorable person."
Saddam didn't listen to him, but he also certainly didn't punish him for giving him the truth.
I was a Marine in Iraq from 06-09. We constantly built plans for the inevitable demise of this dam. Mostly just estimates of how screwed people would be. I'm surprised it's not blown yet, I was constantly worried someone would bomb it somehow, but 7 years later, it's still standing, so I'm unsure about any estimates given now - the Iraqis were fairly liberal in their estimates in 2006 (it'll fall by 2007) and the sam…
Surprised that some big infrastructure company like Halli or Bechtel didn't see an opportunity to scheme some business from this.
Don't forget the fact that Feinstein's husband was head of a doc at Bechtel Corp and she was on the Military construction Appropriations committee, they funneled a lot of money through that incestuous relationship.
She left that committee in 2008, which was plenty of time for graft.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of those guys were severely burned by the Iraqi Adventure. SFAIK, Halli divested of Brown-Root. Big Engineering like that might as well be politics. And this makes me think of the St. Francis Dam. "It's Chinatown, Jake."
I watched that movie while coming down (ok, failing to come down) from my first acid trip. Not the right choice. Great movie though.
What movie are you talking about?
> The dam was designed by a Swiss firm of consultants and built by a German-Italian consortium in 1984. Water began seeping through in 1986, when it became apparent that the geological issues were worse than the consultants had predicted. I doubt that this was an innocent failure on their part. There was a huge financial incentive for these firms to find some way to validate this project. Successive foreign consultan…
Now there's a name I haven't heard in a very long time...